She'd been in labor for nineteen hours; I completely understood why she wanted to pass the buck. 'You are so beautiful,' her husband crooned, holding up her shoulders.'You are so full of shit,' Lila snarled, but as a contraction settled over her like a net, she bore down and pushed.

When we're alive, life consumes us. But when we die, all of the color and the motion is gone so quickly, it's as though it can no longer stand to be wasted on us.

Lauren DeStefano

The highest reward for a person's toil is not what they get for it, but what they become by it.

John Ruskin

one of the strongest motives that lead men to art and science isescape from everyday life with its painful crudity and hopelessdreariness, from the fetters of one's own ever-shifting desires. Afinely tempered nature longs to escape from the personal life into theworld of objective perception and thought.

Albert Einstein

Stone walls do not a prison make nor iron bars a cage; minds innocent and quiet take that for an hermitage.

Richard Lovelace

Art distills sensations and embodies it with enhanced meaning.

Jacques Barzun

Be happy with what you have and are, be generous with both, and you won't have to hunt for happiness.

William Ewart Gladstone

I had this wonderful career and thought I would retire as a teacher.

Tim Gunn

Self-belief, also called self-efficacy, is the kind of feeling you have when you have, like a Jedi, mastered a particular kind of skill and with its help have been able to achieve your set goals.

Stephen Richards

What motivates me in art is the ugly and beautiful nature of the truth. It has to be truthful and honest, even if it is ugly and grotesque.

Corin Nemec

A man without decision can never be said to belong to himself.

John W. Foster

By seeing London, I have seen as much of life as the world can show.

Samuel Johnson

I started skydiving because I loved the idea of freedom.

Felix Baumgartner